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| Welcome to Jacksonville. Good luck. You’re going to need it. |
ONE of the biggest days of the year in Lose occurs the day after the NFL regular season ends, when teams cut bait, cut their losses and clean house. We’re up to six head coaching vacancies already, which is almost a third of the league. Three coaches had already gotten axed during the regular season – Gus Bradley in Jacksonville, Jeff Fisher in Los Angeles, and Rex Ryan with the Buffalo Bills, who promptly showed their general enthusiasm for this season by getting waxed by the Jets in a loss that included quite possibly the dumbest play we’ll see all of 2017. You can add San Diego’s Mike McCoy to the list, as well as Chip Kelley in San Francisco, who was fired along with GM Trent Baalke in the classic bumbling 49ers fashion whereby they go about leaking it to the media before ever talking to anyone whose about to lose his job.
The sixth vacancy is in Denver, where Gary Kubiak is stepping away for personal reasons, and there are likely to be more: Sean Payton may be a hotter commodity outside of New Orleans than within, and may try to finagle out of his contract if the Saints don’t can him first; there are rumblings of discontent with Chuck Pagano in Indianapolis; the Potatoes sure look like they have quit on Jay Gruden in Washington, given how poorly they played in a must-win game against a Giants team with nothing to play for and their minds somewhere off the Florida Coast; and who the hell knows what the Jets are going to do?
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| J-E-T-S MESS MESS MESS! |
So if you’re an aspiring NFL head coach, it’s time to get that résumé in order – or, if you’re an ex-coach, it’s time to go into spin control mode and try to position yourself to get another gig. And welcome to the mess, because wherever you go, it’s likely to be one.
Being a head coach in the NFL has to be one of the worst jobs imaginable. Your life’s work is judged in the public eye on a weekly basis in black and in white: a loss is a loss, and the results speak for themselves. You’ve got a huge base of customers – not just fans, mind you, but paying customers who but their asses in seats eight times a season – who will second-guess everything you do, win or lose. You’ve got rich fat cat bosses who can’t help but meddle and interfere with what you’re trying to do. You’ve got GMs and personnel guys over your head whose job it is to provide you with the talent necessary to be successful, and quite possibly have a far different opinion of what constitutes talent than you do, and then you have 53 players that you’re responsible for, all of whom think, to some degree or another, that you’re a tool. It’s perhaps because the job is so bad in the first place that there are so few people who seem to be any good at it.
I mean, let’s be honest here, who out there in the NFL who still has a head coaching job is someone that all of us armchair QBs would actually argue is “good” at his job? I passed this question along to Scott Pianowski, The Official NFL Guru of In Play Lose, since he follows the league a whole lot closer than I do and, from my distant and somewhat detached vantage point, it sure as hell seems like a lot of these guys don’t know what they’re doing.
We tried to compile a list of NFL head coaches that we like and this what we came up with: Mike Tomlin in Pittsburgh and John Harbaugh in Baltimore immediately came to mind. I think Bruce Arians has done pretty well in Arizona while Scott suggested Andy Reid, who gets pilloried every time he mismanages the game clock but has successfully won both with the Iggles and the Chefs. We both think Adam Gase and Dan Quinn have shown some good things in Miami and Atlanta, respectively. And then it gets a little murky. Marvin Lewis? Well, Cincinnati was a joke before he got there, and now they’re merely disappointing. Then there are a whole bunch of guys – Mike McCarthy in Green Bay, Jack Del Rio in Oakland, Ron Rivera in Carolina – where it’s hard to discern if it’s a case of good coaching or simply really good QB play. And the rest? Meh.
But to me, at least, Bill Belichick and Pete Carroll are on an entirely different level – and Belichick and Carroll are interesting test cases for what constitutes great coaching in the NFL.
Belichick is the ultimate shape-shifter, his schemes constantly adapting depending upon personnel and the ways that the NFL is trending. If you look over his tenure at New England, you’ll notice just how frequently he adapts, particularly on the offensive end: they’ll emphasis power running one year, scat back receivers in the slots the next, and then they might go with two big tight ends and a centralized passing game after that. He’s always zigging where people are zagging, coming up with new looks and wrinkles on the offensive end. He is always looking for players with high football IQs who can be versatile, able to transfer over to multiple positions to fill whatever need arises.
Carroll, meanwhile, has built a near dynast in Seattle by emphasizing defense and physicality while imposing the tenor and the tempo of the game upon its opponents. The Seahawks have gone about redefining the sorts of physical specs you want in players. They want big corners, swift linebackers, and linemen who are high-energy players that he can constantly rotate and keep fresh. Carroll’s approach emphasizes having position coaches on his staff who are excellent teachers, believing first and foremost that skills and techniques can be taught. As such, the Seahawks have constantly been able to restock their talent base. It can look a bit ugly on the field at times, as young players are obviously engaged in some intense on-the-job training, but eventually they figure it out and the Seahawks go back to whacking people.
Keep in mind, both the Pats and the Seahawks are perpetually drafting in the 20s, if not the 30s. Literally every team in the league has a better shot of landing players through the draft, and yet the Pats and Seahawks keep drafting in the 20s and the 30s year after year because they keep winning all of the time. And we should also keep in mind that Belichick and Carroll both got fired from their first head coaching jobs. Carroll got fired twice, in fact – in 1994 after a 6-10 season with the Jets, and then in 1999 after three seasons coaching the Patriots, where he was replaced by … Belichick, who’d failed miserably in Cleveland, winning only a single playoff game and antagonizing the entire Browns fan base in the process with his impromptu cutting of starting QB and local hero Bernie Kosar. I mentioned previously that I attended the first post-Kosar Browns game, which was against the Seahawks at the Giant Concrete Mushroom Fungus in Seattle, and it was one of the worst football games I’ve ever seen. At no point did it seem like either the Browns or Belichick knew what they was doing. So as you can see, this isn’t an exact science by any means. The guys who are clearly the best also screwed up a lot and, after failing at previous jobs, there was naturally a bit of skepticism in Boston and Seattle about being hired to their present job.
But if you go back to that list we put forth above – which, admittedly, we sort of just threw together off the top of our heads – that’s not a lot of guys. That’s far fewer guys then there are jobs. In the NFL, just like any other business, it appears to be hard to get good help these days.
But like I said at the beginning, this is also one of the worst jobs imaginable. Why would you want this job? Sure, being great at coaching requires enormous self-confidence, just like being great at anything else, and that hubris might lead you to think you could take over coaching a franchise like the Jacksonville Jaguars – which has been, and continues to be, one of the worst ideas for a franchise off all time, never mind one that exists – and make them successful. I mean, look at these jobs that are available at the moment. Other than the Denver gig, which is a no-brainer, and maybe the Indianapolis gig if it comes open, the rest of them are really bad jobs! Who wants to work for Jed York in San Francisco after he’s one-and-doned head coaches in consecutive seasons? Who wants to work for Stan Kroenke? Or you can report directly to this guy in Buffalo. But in the end, people take the gigs, simply because there are only 32 of them. A bad job that’s a dead end road to nowhere somehow seems like a better option than not taking a job at all.
Coaches are hired to be fired, in the end. Even good ones can wear out their welcome and grow stale over time, like Tom Coughlin did with the Giants. And while both the Pats and the Hawks have spent quite a while trying to develop an organizational philosophy, from top to bottom, if you take a guy out of that system and plunk him in a head gig elsewhere and he doesn’t necessary flourish: witness the endless number of failed head coaches plucked from Belichick’s staff over the years, and ex-Jag coach Bradley worked under Carroll in Seattle, which has become the en vogue team to raid for coaching talent in recent years. And, of course, the truth is that most of the time, teams are bad because their players are bad. You can make bad players better, but it’s hard to make them good – and it’s often the guys making this very hire, the GMs, who are responsible for the dire state of the talent base and are firing coaches in order to save their own skin. You have to get this hire right, lest you end up showing up in this corner of cyberspace a year or two from now.
